THE AGE OF PROSE
When the curtain again rose on Russian literature it was on an era of
prose; and the leading protagonist of that era, both by his works of
fiction and his dramatic work, was NICHOLAS GOGOL [1809-52]. It is
true that in the thirties Russia began to produce home-made novels. In
Pushkin's story _The Queen of Spades_, when somebody asks the old
Countess if she wishes to read a Russian novel, she says "A Russian
novel? Are there any?" This stage had been passed; but the novels and
the plays that were produced at this time until the advent of Gogol
have been--deservedly for the greater part--forgotten. And, just as
Lermontov was the successor of Pushkin in the domain of poetry, so in
the domain of satire Gogol was the successor of Griboyedov; and in
creating a national work he was the heir of Pushkin.
Gogol was a Little Russian. He was born in 1809 near Poltava, in the
Cossack country, and was brought up by his grandfather, a Cossack; but
he left the Ukraine and settled in 1829 in St. Petersburg, where he
obtained a place in a Government office. After an unsuccessful attempt
to go on the stage, and a brief career as tutor, he was given a
professorship of History; but he failed here also, and finally turned
to literature. The publication of his first efforts gained him the
acquaintance of the literary men of the day, and he became the friend
of Pushkin, who proved a valuable friend, adviser, and critic, and
urged him to write on the life of the people. He lived in St.
Petersburg from 1829 to 1836; and it was perhaps home-sickness which
inspired him to write his Little Russian sketches--_Evenings on a Farm
on the Dikanka_,--which appeared in 1832, followed by _Mirgorod_, a
second series, in 1834.
Gogol's temperament was romantic. He had a great deal of the dreamer
in him, a touch of the eerie, a delight in the supernatural, an impish
fancy that reminds one sometimes of Hoffmann and sometimes of R. L.
Stevenson, as well as a deep religious vein which was later on to
dominate and oust all his other qualities. But, just as we find in the
Russian poets a curious mixture of romanticism and realism, of
imagination and common-sense, so in Gogol, side by side with his
imaginative gifts, which were great, there is a realism based on
minute observation. In addition to this, and tempering his penetrating
observation, he had a rich streak of humour, a many-sided humour,
ranging from laughter holding both its sides, to a delicate and half
melancholy chuckle, and in his later work to biting irony.
In the very first story of his first book, "The Fair of Sorochinetz,"
we are plunged into an atmosphere that smells of Russia in a way that
no other Russian book has ever yet savoured of the soil. We are
plunged into the South, on a blazing noonday, when the corn is
standing in sheaves and wheat is being sold at the fair; and the fair,
with its noise, its smell and its colour, rises before us as vividly
as Normandy leaps out of the pages of Maupassant, or Scotland from the
pages of Stevenson. And just as Andrew Lang once said that probably
only a Scotsman, and a Lowland Scotsman, could know how true to life
the characters in _Kidnapped_ were, so it is probable that only a
Russian, and indeed a Little Russian, appreciates to the full how true
to life are the people, the talk, and the ambient air in the tales of
Gogol. And then we at once get that hint of the supernatural which
runs like a scarlet thread through all these stories; the rumour that
the _Red Jacket_ has been observed in the fair; and the _Red Jacket_,
so the gossips say, belongs to a little Devil, who being turned out of
Hell as a punishment for some misdemeanour--probably a good
intention--established himself in a neighbouring barn, and from
home-sickness took to drink, and drank away all his substance; so that
he was obliged to pawn his red jacket for a year to a Jew, who sold it
before the year was out, whereupon the buyer, recognizing its unholy
origin, cut it up into bits and threw it away, after which the Devil
appeared in the shape of a pig every year at the fair to find the
pieces. It is on this Red Jacket that the story turns.
In this first volume, the supernatural plays a predominant part
throughout; the stories tell of water-nymphs, the Devil, who steals
the moon, witches, magicians, and men who traffic with the Evil One
and lose their souls. In the second series, _Mirgorod_, realism comes
to the fore in the stories of "The Old-Fashioned Landowners" and "The
Quarrel of the Two Ivans." These two stories contain between them the
sum and epitome of the whole of one side of Gogol's genius, the
realistic side. In the one story, "The Old-Fashioned Landowners," we
get the gentle good humour which tells the charming tale of a South
Russian Philemon and Baucis, their hospitality and kindliness, and the
loneliness of Philemon when Baucis is taken away, told with the art of
La Fontaine, and with many touches that remind one of Dickens. The
other story, "The Quarrel of the Two Ivans," who are bosom friends and
quarrel over nothing, and are, after years, on the verge of making it
up when the mere mention of the word "goose" which caused the quarrel
sets alight to it once more and irrevocably, is in Gogol's richest
farcical vein, with just a touch of melancholy.
And in the same volume, two _nouvelles_, _Tarass Bulba_ and _Viy_, sum
up between them the whole of the other side of Gogol's genius. _Tarass
Bulba_, a short historical novel, with its incomparably vivid picture
of Cossack life, is Gogol's masterpiece in the epic vein. It is as
strong and as direct as a Border ballad. _Viy_, which tells of a
witch, is the most creepy and imaginative of his supernatural stories.
Later, he published two more collections of stories: _Arabesques_
(1834) and _Tales_ (1836). In these, poetry, witches, water-nymphs,
magicians, devils, and epic adventure are all left behind. The element
of the fantastic still subsists, as in the "Portrait," and of the
grotesque, as in the story of the major who loses his nose, which
becomes a separate personality, and wanders about the town. But his
blend of realism and humour comes out strongly in the story of "The
Carriage," and his blend of realism and pathos still more strongly in
the story of "The Overcoat," the story of a minor public servant who
is always shivering and whose dream it is to have a warm overcoat.
After years of privation he saves enough money to buy one, and on the
first day he wears it, it is stolen. He dies of melancholia, and his
ghost haunts the streets. This story is the only begetter of the large
army of pathetic figures of failure that crowd the pages of Russian
literature.
While Gogol had been writing and publishing these tales, he had also
been steadily writing for the stage; but here the great difficulty and
obstacle was the Censorship, which was almost as severe as it was in
England at the end of the reign of Edward VII. But, by a curious
paradox, the play, which you would have expected the Censorship to
forbid before all other plays, _The Revisor_, or _Inspector-General_,
was performed. This was owing to the direct intervention of the
Emperor. _The Revisor_ is the second comic masterpiece of the Russian
stage. The plot was suggested to Gogol by Pushkin. The officials of an
obscure country town hear the startling news that a Government
Inspector is arriving incognito to investigate their affairs. A
traveller from St. Petersburg--a fine natural liar--is taken for the
Inspector, plays up to the part, and gets away just before the arrival
of the real Inspector, which is the end of the play. The play is a
satire on the Russian bureaucracy. Almost every single character in it
is dishonest; and the empty-headed, and irrelevant hero, with his
magnificent talent for easy lying, is a masterly creation. The play
at once became a classic, and retains all its vitality and comic force
to-day. There is no play which draws a larger audience on holidays in
St. Petersburg and Moscow.
After the production of _The Revisor_, Gogol left Russia for ever and
settled in Rome. He had in his mind a work of great importance on
which he had already been working for some time. This was his _Dead
Souls_, his most ambitious work, and his masterpiece. It was Pushkin
who gave him the idea of the book. The hero of the book, Chichikov,
conceives a brilliant idea. Every landlord possessed so many serfs,
called "souls." A revision took place every ten years, and the
landlord had to pay for poll-tax on the "souls" who had died during
that period. Nobody looked at the lists between the periods of
revision. Chichikov's idea was to take over the dead souls from the
landlord, who would, of course, be delighted to be rid of the
fictitious property and the real tax, to register his purchases, and
then to mortgage at a bank at St. Petersburg or Moscow, the "souls,"
which he represented as being in some place in the Crimea, and thus
make money enough to buy "souls" of his own. The book tells of the
adventures of Chichikov as he travels over Russia in search of dead
"souls," and is, like Mr. Pickwick's adventures, an Odyssey,
introducing us to every kind and manner of man and woman. The book was
to be divided in three parts. The first part appeared in 1842. Gogol
went on working at the second and third parts until 1852, when he
died. He twice threw the second part of the work into the fire when it
was finished; so that all we possess is the first part, and the second
part printed from an incomplete manuscript. The second part was
certainly finished when he destroyed it, and it is probable that the
third part was sketched. He had intended in the second part to work
out the moral regeneration of Chichikov, and to give to the world his
complete message. Persecuted by a dream he was unable to realize and
an ambition which he was not able to fulfil, Gogol was driven inwards,
and his natural religious feeling grew more intense and made him into
an ascetic and a recluse. This break in the middle of his career is
characteristic of Russia. Tolstoy, of course, furnishes the most
typical example of the same thing. But it is a common Russian
characteristic for men midway in a successful career to turn aside
from it altogether, and seek consolation in the things which are not
of this world.
Gogol's _Dead Souls_ made a deep impression upon educated Russia. It
pleased the enthusiasts for Western Europe by its reality, its
artistic conception and execution, and by its social ideas; and it
pleased the Slavophile Conservatives by its truth to life, and by its
smell of Russia. When the first chapter was read aloud to Pushkin, he
said, when Gogol had finished: "God, what a sad country Russia is!"
And it is certainly true, that amusing as the book is, inexpressibly
comic as so many of the scenes are, Gogol does not flatter his country
or his countrymen; and when Russians read it at the time it appeared,
many must have been tempted to murmur "_doux pays!_"--as they would,
indeed, now, were a writer with the genius of a Gogol to appear and
describe the adventures of a modern Chichikov; for, though
circumstances may be entirely different, although there are no more
"souls" to be bought or sold, Chichikov is still alive--and as Gogol
said, there was probably not one of his readers who after an honest
self-examination, would not wonder if he had not something of
Chichikov in him, and who if he were to meet an acquaintance at that
moment, would not nudge his companion and say: "There goes Chichikov."
"And who and what is Chichikov?" The answer is: "A scoundrel." But
such an entertaining scoundrel, so abject, so shameless, so utterly
devoid of self-respect, such a magnificent liar, so plausible an
impostor, so ingenious a cheat, that he rises from scoundrelism almost
to greatness.
There is, indeed, something of the greatness of Falstaff in this
trafficker of dead "souls." His baseness is almost sublime. He in any
case merits a place in the gallery of humanity's typical and human
rascals, where Falstaff, Tartuffe, Pecksniff, and Count Fosco reign.
He has the great saving merit of being human; nor can he be accused of
hypocrisy. His coachman, Selifan, who got drunk with every "decent
man," is worthy of the creator of Sam Weller. But what distinguishes
Gogol in his _Dead Souls_ from the great satirists of other nations,
and his satire from the _saeva indignatio_ of Swift, for instance, is
that, after laying bare to the bones the rascality of his hero, he
turns round on his audience and tells them that there is no cause for
indignation; Chichikov is only a victim of a ruling passion--gain;
perhaps, indeed, in the chill existence of a Chichikov, there may be
something which will one day cause us to humble ourselves on our knees
and in the dust before the Divine Wisdom. His irony is lined with
indulgence; his sleepless observation is tempered by fundamental
charity. He sees what is mean and common clearer than any one, but he
does not infer from it that life, or mankind, or the world is common
or mean. He infers the opposite. He puts Chichikov no lower morally
than he would put Napoleon, Harpagon, or Don Juan--all of them victims
of a ruling passion, and all of them great by reason of it--for
Chichikov is also great in rascality, just as Harpagon was great in
avarice, and Don Juan great in profligacy. And this large charity
blent with biting irony is again peculiarly Russian.
_Dead Souls_ is a deeper book than any of Gogol's early work. It is
deep in the same way as _Don Quixote_ is deep; and like _Don Quixote_
it makes boys laugh, young men think, and old men weep. Apart from
its philosophy and ideas, _Dead Souls_ had a great influence on
Russian literature as a work of art. Just as Pushkin set Russian
poetry free from the high-flown and the conventional, so did Gogol set
Russian fiction free from the dominion of the grand style. He carried
Pushkin's work--the work which Pushkin had accomplished in verse and
adumbrated in prose--much further; and by depicting ordinary life, and
by writing a novel without any love interest, with a Chichikov for a
hero, he created Russian realism. He described what he saw without
flattery and without exaggeration, but with the masterly touch, the
instinctive economy, the sense of selection of a great artist.
This, at the time it was done, was a revolution. Nobody then would
have dreamed it possible to write a play or a novel without a
love-motive; and just as Pushkin revealed to Russia that there was
such a thing as Russian landscape, Gogol again, going one better,
revealed the fascination, the secret and incomprehensible power that
lay in the flat monotony of the Russian country, and the inexhaustible
source of humour, absurdity, irony, quaintness, farce, comedy in the
everyday life of the ordinary people. So that, however much his
contemporaries might differ as to the merits or demerits, the harm or
the beneficence, of his work, he left his nation with permanent and
classic models of prose and fiction and stories, just as Pushkin had
bequeathed to them permanent models of verse.
Gogol wrote no more fiction after _Dead Souls_. In 1847 _Passages from
a Correspondence with a Friend_ was published, which created a
sensation, because in the book Gogol preached submission to the
Government, both spiritual and temporal. The Western enthusiasts and
the Liberals in general were highly disgusted. One can understand
their disgust; it is less easy to understand their surprise; for Gogol
had never pretended to be a Liberal. He showed up the evils of
Bureaucracy and the follies and weaknesses of Bureaucrats, because
they were there, just as he showed up the stinginess of misers and the
obstinacy of old women. But it is quite as easy for a Conservative to
do this as it is for a Liberal, and quite as easy for an orthodox
believer as for an atheist. But Gogol's contemporaries had not
realized the tempest that had been raging for a long time in Gogol's
soul, and which he kept to himself. He had always been religious, and
now he became exclusively religious; he made a pilgrimage to the Holy
Land; he spent his substance in charity, especially to poor students;
and he lived in asceticism until he died, at the age of forty-three.
What a waste, one is tempted to say--and how often one is tempted to
say this in the annals of Russian literature--and yet, one wonders!
What we possess of the second part of _Dead Souls_ is in Gogol's best
vein, and of course one cannot help bitterly regretting that the rest
was destroyed or possibly never written; but one wonders whether, had
he not had within him the intensity of feeling which led him
ultimately to renounce art, he would have been the artist that he was;
whether he would have been capable of creating so many-coloured a
world of characters, and whether the soil out of which those works
grew was not in reality the kind of soil out of which religious
renunciation was at last bound to flower. However that may be, Gogol
left behind him a rich inheritance. He is one of the great humorists
of European literature, and whoever gives England a really fine
translation of his work, will do his country a service. Mérimée places
Gogol among the best _English_ humorists. His humour and his pathos
were closely allied; but there is no acidity in his irony. His work
may sometimes sadden you, but (as in the case of Krylov's two pigeons)
it will never bore you, and it will never leave you with a feeling of
stale disgust or a taste as of sharp alum, for his work is based on
charity, and it has in its form and accent the precious gift of charm.
Gogol is an author who will always be loved even as much as he is
admired, and his stories are a boon to the young; to many a Russian
boy and girl the golden gates of romance have been opened by Gogol,
the destroyer of Russian romanticism, the inaugurator of Russian
realism.
Side by side with fiction, another element grew up in this age of
prose, namely criticism. Karamzin in the twenties had been the first
to introduce literary criticism, and critical appreciations of
Pushkin's work appeared from time to time in the _European Messenger_.
PRINCE VYAZEMSKY, whose literary activity lasted from 1808-78, was a
critic as well as a poet and a satirist, a fine example of the type of
great Russian nobles so frequent in Russian books, who were not only
saturated with culture but enriched literature with their work, and
carried on the tradition of cool, clear wit, clean expression, and
winged phrase that we find in Griboyedov. POLEVOY, a self-educated man
of humble extraction, was the first professional journalist, and
created the tradition of violent and fiery polemics, which has lasted
till this day in Russian journalism. But the real founder of Russian
æsthetic, literary, and journalistic criticism was BELINSKY
(1811-1847).
Like Polevoy, he was of humble extraction and almost entirely
self-educated. He lived in want and poverty and ill-health. His life
was a long battle against every kind of difficulty and obstacle; his
literary production was more than hampered by the Censorship, but his
influence was far-reaching and deep. He created Russian criticism, and
after passing through several phases--a German phase of Hegelian
philosophy, Gallophobia, enthusiasm for Shakespeare and Goethe and for
objective art, a French phase of enthusiasm for art as practised in
France, ended finally in a didactic phase of which the watchword was
that Life was more important than Art.
The first blossoms of the new generation of writers, Goncharov,
Dostoyevsky, Herzen, and others, grew up under his encouragement. He
expounded Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Griboyedov, Zhukovsky and the
writers of the past. His judgments have remained authoritative; but
some of his final judgments, which were unshaken for generations, such
as for instance his estimates of Pushkin and Lermontov, were much
biassed and coloured by his didacticism. He burnt what he had adored
in the case of Gogol, who, like Pushkin, became for him too much of an
artist, and not enough of a social reformer. Whatever phase Belinsky
went through, he was passionate, impulsive, and violent, incapable of
being objective, or of doing justice to an opponent, or of seeing two
sides to a question. He was a polemical and fanatical knight errant,
the prophet and propagandist of Western influence, the bitter enemy of
the Slavophiles.
The didactic stamp which he gave to Russian æsthetic and literary
criticism has remained on it ever since, and differentiates it from
the literary and æsthetic criticism of the rest of Europe, not only
from that school of criticism which wrote and writes exclusively under
the banner of "Art for Art's Sake," but from those Western critics who
championed the importance of moral ideas in literature, just as
ardently as he did himself, and who deprecated the theory of Art for
Art's sake just as strongly. Thus it is that, from the beginning of
Russian criticism down to the present day, a truly objective criticism
scarcely exists in Russian literature. Æsthetic criticism becomes a
political weapon. "Are you in my camp?" if so, you are a good writer.
"Are you in my opponent's camp?" then your god-gifted genius is mere
dross.
The reason of this has been luminously stated by Professor Brückner:
"To the intelligent Russian, without a free press, without the liberty
of assembly, without the right to free expression of opinion,
literature became the last refuge of freedom of thought, the only
means of propagating higher ideas. He expected of his country's
literature not merely æsthetic recreation; he placed it at the service
of his aspirations.... Hence the striking partiality, nay unfairness,
displayed by the Russians towards the most perfect works of their own
literature, when they did not respond to the aims or expectations of
their party or their day." And speaking of the criticism that was
produced after 1855, he says: "This criticism is often, in spite of
all its giftedness, its ardour and fire, only a mockery of all
criticism. The work only serves as an example on which to hang the
critics' own views.... This is no reproach; we simply state the fact,
and fully recognize the necessity and usefulness of the method. With a
backward society, ... this criticism was a means which was sanctified
by the end, the spreading of free opinions.... Unhappily, Russian
literary criticism has remained till to-day almost solely
journalistic, _i. e._ didactic and partisan. See how even now it
treats the most interesting, exceptional, and mighty of all Russians,
Dostoyevsky, merely because he does not fit into the Radical mould!
How unjust it has been towards others! How it has extolled to the
clouds the representatives of its own camp!" I quote Professor
Brückner, lest I should be myself suspected of being partial in this
question. The question, perhaps, may admit of further expansion. It
is not that the Russian critics were merely convinced it was
all-important that art should have ideas at the roots of it, and had
no patience with a merely shallow æstheticism. They went further; the
ideas had to be of one kind. A definite political tendency had to be
discerned; and if the critic disagreed with that political tendency,
then no amount of qualities--not artistic excellence, form, skill,
style, not even genius, inspiration, depth, feeling, philosophy--were
recognized.
Herein lies the great difference between Russian and Western critics,
between Sainte-Beuve and Belinsky; between Matthew Arnold and his
Russian contemporaries. Matthew Arnold defined the highest poetry as
being a criticism of life; but that would not have prevented him from
doing justice either to a poet so polemical as Byron, or to a poet so
completely unpolitical, so sheerly æsthetic as Keats; to Lord
Beaconsfield as a novelist, to Mr. Morley or Lord Acton as historians,
because their "tendency" or their "politics" were different from his
own. The most biassed of English or French critics is broad-minded
compared to a Russian critic. Had Keats been a Russian poet, Belinsky
would have swept him away with contempt; Wordsworth would have been
condemned as reactionary; and Swinburne's politics alone would have
been taken into consideration. At the present day, almost ten years
after Professor Brückner wrote his _History of Russian Literature_, now
that the press is more or less free, save for occasional pin-pricks,
now that literary output is in any case unfettered, and the stage freer
than it is in England, the same criticism still applies. Russian
literary criticism is still journalistic. There are and there always
have been brilliant exceptions, of course, two of the most notable of
which are VOLYNSKY and MEREZHKOVSKY; but as a rule the political camp
to which the writer belongs is the all-important question; and I know
cases of Russian politicians who have been known to refuse to write,
even in foreign reviews, because they disapproved of the "tendency" of
those reviews, the tendency being non-existent--as is generally the
case with English reviews,--and the review harbouring opinions of every
shade and tendency. You would think that narrow-mindedness could no
further go than to refuse to let your work appear in an impartial
organ, lest in that same organ an opinion opposed to your own might
appear also. But the cause of this is the same now as it used to be,
namely that, in spite of there being a greater measure of freedom in
Russia, political liberty does not yet exist. Liberty of assembly does
not exist; liberty of conscience only partially exists; the press is
annoyed and hampered by restrictions; and the great majority of Russian
writers are still engaged in fighting for these things, and therefore
still ready to sacrifice fairness for the greater end,--the achievement
of political freedom.
Thus criticism in Russia became a question of camps, and the question
arises, what were these camps? From the dawn of the age of pure
literature, Russia was divided into two great camps: The Slavophiles
and the Propagandists of Western Ideas.
The trend towards the West began with the influence of Joseph Le
Maistre and the St. Petersburg Jesuits. In 1836, CHAADAEV, an
ex-guardsman who had served in the Russian campaign in France and
travelled a great deal in Western Europe, and who shared Joseph Le
Maistre's theory that Russia had suffered by her isolation from the
West and through the influence of the former Byzantine Empire,
published the first of his _Lettres sur la Philosophie de l'Histoire_
in the _Telescope_ of Moscow. This letter came like a bomb-shell. He
glorified the tradition and continuity of the Catholic world. He said
that Russia existed, as it were, outside of time, without the
tradition either of the Orient or of the Occident, and that the
universal culture of the human race had not touched it. "The
atmosphere of the West produces ideas of duty, law, justice, order; we
have given nothing to the world and taken nothing from it; ... we have
not contributed anything to the progress of humanity, and we have
disfigured everything we have taken from that progress. Hostile
circumstances have alienated us from the general trend in which the
social idea of Christianity grew up; thus we ought to revise our
faith, and begin our education over again on another basis." The
expression of these incontrovertible sentiments resulted in the exile
of the editor of the _Telescope_, the dismissal of the Censor, and in
the official declaration of Chaadaev's insanity, who was put under
medical supervision for a year.
Chaadaev made disciples who went further than he did, PRINCESS
VOLKONSKY, the authoress of a notable book on the Orthodox Church, and
PRINCE GAGARIN, who both became Catholics. This was one branch of
Westernism. Another branch, to which Belinsky belonged, had no
Catholic leanings, but sought for salvation in socialism and atheism.
The most important figure in this branch is ALEXANDER HERZEN
(1812-1870). His real name was Yakovlev; his father, a wealthy
nobleman, married in Germany, but did not legalize his marriage in
Russia, so his children took their mother's name.
Herzen's career belongs rather to the history of Russia than to the
history of Russian literature; were it not that, besides being one of
the greatest and most influential personalities of his time, he was a
great memoir-writer. He began, after a mathematical training at the
University, with fiction, of which the best example is a novel _Who is
to Blame?_ which paints the _génie sans portefeuille_ of the period
that Turgenev was so fond of depicting. Herzen was exiled on account
of his oral propaganda, first to Perm, and then to Vyatka. In 1847, he
left Russia for ever, and lived abroad for the rest of his life, at
first in Paris, and afterwards in London, where he edited a newspaper
called _The Bell_.
Herzen was a Socialist. Western Europe he considered to be played out.
He looked upon Socialism as a new religion and a new form of
Christianity, which would be to the new world what Christianity had
been to the old. The Russian peasants would play the part of the
Invasion of the Barbarians; and the functions of the State would be
taken over by the Russian Communes on a basis of voluntary and mutual
agreement--the principle of the Commune, of sharing all possessions in
common, being so near the fundamental principle of Christianity.
"A thinking Russian," he wrote, "is the most independent being in the
world. What can stop him? Consideration for the past? But what is the
starting-point of modern Russian history if it be not a total negation
of nationalism and tradition?... What do we care, disinherited minors
that we are, for the duties you have inherited? Can your worn-out
morality satisfy us? Your morality which is neither Christian nor
human, which is used only in copybooks and for the ritual of the
law?" Again: "We are free because we begin with our own liberation; we
are independent; we have nothing to lose or to honour. A Russian will
never be a protestant, or follow the _juste milieu_ ... our
civilization is external, our corrupt morals quite crude."
The great point Herzen was always making was that Russia had escaped
the baleful tradition of Western Europe, and the hereditary infection
of Western corruption. Thus, in his disenchantment with Western
society and his enthusiasm for the communal ownership of land, he was
at one with the Slavophiles; where he differed from them was in
accepting certain Western ideas, and in thinking that a new order of
things, a new heaven and earth, could be created by a social
revolution, which should be carried out by the Slavs. His
influence--he was one of the precursors of Nihilism, for the seed he
sowed, falling on the peculiar soil where it fell, produced the
whirlwind as a harvest--belongs to history. What belongs to literature
are his memoirs, _My Past and my Thoughts_ (_Byloe i Dumy_), which
were written between 1852 and 1855. These memoirs of everyday life
and encounters with all sorts and conditions of extraordinary men are
in their subject-matter as exciting as a novel, and, in their style,
on a level with the masterpieces of Russian prose, through their
subtle psychology, interest, wit, and artistic form.
Herzen lived to see his ideas bearing fruit in the one way which of
all others he would have sought to avoid, namely in "militancy" and
terrorism. When in 1866, an attempt was made by Karakozov to
assassinate Alexander II, and Herzen wrote an article repudiating all
political assassinations as barbarous, the revolutionary parties
solemnly denounced him and his newspaper. _The Bell_, which had
already lost its popularity owing to Herzen's pro-Polish sympathies in
1863, ceased to have any circulation. Thus he lived to see his vast
hopes shattered, the seed he had sown bearing a fruit he distrusted,
his dreams of regeneration burst like a bubble, his ideals exploited
by unscrupulous criminals. He died in 1870, leaving a name which is as
great in Russian literature as it is remarkable in Russian history.
Turning now to the _Slavophiles_, their idea was that Russia was
already in possession of the best possible institutions,--orthodoxy,
autocracy, and communal ownership, and that the West had everything to
learn from Russia. They pointed to the evils arising from the feudal
and aristocratic state, the system of primogeniture in the West, the
higher legal status of women in Russia, and the superiority of a
communal system, which leads naturally to a Consultative National
Assembly with unanimous decisions, over the parliaments and party
systems of the West.
The leader of the Slavophiles was HOMYAKOV, a man of great culture; a
dialectician, a poet, and an impassioned defender of orthodoxy. The
best of his lyrics, which are inspired by a profound love of his
country and belief in it, have great depth of feeling. Besides
Homyakov, there were other poets, such as TYUTCHEV and IVAN AKSAKOV.
Just as the camp of Reform produced in Herzen a supreme writer of
memoirs, that of the Slavophiles also produced a unique memoir writer
in the SERGE AKSAKOV, the father of the poet (1791-1859), who
published his _Family Chronicle_ in 1856, and who describes the life
of the end of the eighteenth century, and the age of Alexander. This
book, one of the most valuable historical documents in Russian, and a
priceless collection of biographical portraits, is also a gem of
Russian prose, exact in its observation, picturesque and perfectly
balanced in its diction.
Aksakov remembered with unclouded distinctness exactly what he had
seen in his childhood, which he spent in the district of Orenburg. He
paints the portraits of his grandfather and his great-aunt. We see
every detail of the life of a backwoodsman of the days of Catherine
II. We see the noble of those days, simple and rustic in his habits as
a peasant, almost entirely unlettered, and yet a gentleman through and
through, unswerving in maintaining the standard of morals and
traditions which he considers due to his ancient lineage. We see every
hour of the day of his life in the country; we hear all the details of
the family life, the marriage of his son, the domestic troubles of his
sister.
What strikes one most, perhaps, besides the contrast between the
primitive simplicity of the habits and manners of the life described,
and the astoundingly gentlemanlike feelings of the man who leads this
quiet and rustic life in remote and backward conditions, is that there
is not a hint or suspicion of anything antiquated in the sentiments
and opinions we see at play. The story of Aksakov's grandfather might
be that of any country gentleman in any country, at any epoch, making
allowances for a certain difference in manners and customs and
conditions which were peculiar to the epoch in question, the existence
of serfdom, for instance--although here, too, the feeling with regard
to manners described is startlingly like the ideal of good manners of
any epoch, although the _moeurs_ are sometimes different. The story
is as vivid and as interesting as that of any novel, as that of the
novels of Russian writers of genius, and it has the additional value
of being true. And yet we never feel that Aksakov has a thought of
compiling a historical document for the sake of its historical
interest. He is making history unawares, just as Monsieur Jourdain
talked prose without knowing it; and, whether he was aware of it or
not, he wrote perfect prose. No more perfect piece of prose writing
exists. The style flows on like a limpid river; there is nothing
superfluous, and not a hesitating touch. It is impossible to put down
the narrative after once beginning it, and I have heard of children
who read it like a fairy-tale. One has the sensation, in reading it,
of being told a story by some enchanting nurse, who, when the usual
question, "Is it true?" is put to her, could truthfully answer, "Yes,
it is true." The pictures of nature, the portraits of the people, all
the good and all the bad of the good and the bad old times pass before
one with epic simplicity and the magic of a fairy-tale. One is
spellbound by the charm, the dignity, the good-nature, the gentle,
easy accent of the speaker, in whom one feels convinced not only that
there was nothing common nor mean, but to whom nothing was common or
mean, who was a gentleman by character as well as by lineage, one of
God's as well as one of Russia's nobility.
There is no book in Russian which, for its entrancing interest as well
as for its historical value, so richly deserves translation into
English; only such a translation should be made by a stylist--that is,
by a man who knows how to speak and write his mother tongue
perspicuously and simply.